​China, Crimea and Pashtunistan

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of "Globalistan" (2007), "Red Zone Blues" (2007), "Obama does Globalistan" (2009) and "Empire of Chaos" (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is "2030", also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.

At the center of the simultaneous tumult faced by both Afghanistan and Pakistan stands the ultimate taboo: Pashtunistan. How does the dream of a common Pashtun land connect to the secession of Crimea from Ukraine? And what does China think about all this?

Let’s start with Pakistan. US counterinsurgency
“experts” such as disgraced former Gen. David Petraeus’
guru, David Kilcullen, insist Pakistan is imploding. No wonder;
hacks like himself get paid to predict chaos.

It’s much more nuanced, as usual. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif is actually trying to prevent Pakistan from imploding.
That's why he wants a deal with the TTP – the Pakistani Taliban.

Sharif’s party, the PML-N, is conservative in religious and
neoliberal in economics terms. It's intimately connected to
Pakistani religious parties. Sharif knows he has to be careful in
the Punjab region because of the local popularity of anti-Shiite
jihadists – the Sipah-e-Sahaba outfit.

A derivation of Sipah - the dreadful Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – also
routinely kills a lot of Shiites in Sind and especially
Balochistan. What Sharif has concluded is that he cannot allow an
alliance between the TTP - the Pakistani Taliban, based in the
tribal areas - with jihadi groups active in the Punjab.

Sharif is also a businessman. He knows the only way to get the
Pakistani economy back on track (as if it ever was...) is to end
this civil war. That’s the rationale behind the current
‘peace process’. It’s what he told the Chinese (key
allies) last summer, when he visited Beijing.

For the moment the really nasty issues in the peace process have
not been addressed. The TTP wants Sharia law all over Pakistan.
No Pakistani government would ever accept that.

Enemies of the state

The contact groups on both sides are immensely interesting. On
the government side we find a retired general, Muhammad Amir, an
ex-honcho of the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the
Pakistani CIA. But also ace journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, based
in Peshawar, arguably the top authority anywhere on the Pak
tribal areas.

On the TTP side we find none other than super-mullah Samiul Haq,
the director of the ‘Taliban Harvard’ in Akhora Khattak
near Peshawar, which formed generations of Taliban (disclosure;
it was thanks to a letter signed by Haq that myself and my
photographer were not thrown in jail by the Taliban in Ghazni in
2000, when we ‘invaded’ an abandoned military base.)

The Pakistani army does not like this ‘peace process’
one bit. Especially the ISI, as they keep their very cozy
connections with a lot of jihadi groups to serve Islamabad’s
strategic interests vis-a-vis Afghanistan and/or India. It goes
without saying that the Afghan Taliban, with Mullah Omar almost
certainly still in Quetta (how come no Obama drone could ever
find him?) as well as the Haqqani outfit, in North Waziristan,
are still very close to the ISI.

And back to Punjab, another jihadi nest of nasties -
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which perpetrated the Bombay bombing in 2008 -
are sort of ‘protected’ by the Pakistani army.

But the TTP is something completely different. Unlike all these
other jihadists, they attacked the Pakistani state and its army
head on. That takes balls. No wonder the army sees them as an
enemy of the state - on top of it manipulated by foreigners
(guess who).

The TTP is an impenetrable maze. There are at least 30 different
outfits, who all pledged allegiance to Baitullah Mehsud in 2007.
Obama’s drones keep killing Mehsuds (Baitullah in 2009,
Hakimullah in 2013), but the TTP never dies. And the Mehsud
family stays in the lead.

I’d define the Mehsud family as a Pashtun guerrilla group based
in the tribal areas very close to Afghanistan. The guerrilla is,
yes, against the state, which they consider a bunch of traitors
because they've been American collaborators since 9/11.
Alternatively, one may see the US in Pakistan as essentially at
war – for over a decade - with a Pashtun family.

Now things have changed a bit. The new TTP leader is Mullah
Fazlullah. He’s from Swat, and his base is in the Mohmand tribal
areas, and even Kunar and Nuristan in Afghanistan (very hardcore
places, ultra-conservative). So the key base is not Waziristan
anymore. One wonders whether the Nevada drone gang is fully aware
of it.

There has been a lot of talk in Pakistan that mullah Omar himself
has intervened, trying to unite the now disparate TTP factions to
go on with the dialogue with Islamabad. Why? Because with NATO
out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, what the Afghan Taliban
want is to assemble all Pashtuns on both sides of the border, and
then advance to take over Kabul, in a replay of 1996.

Washington, predictably, is quite fearful of an Islamabad-TTP
peace process. This would allow that perennial bogeyman,
‘Al-Qaeda’, free rein in the tribal areas again. Yet
there may be only a handful of remaining ‘Al-Qaeda’
there; everyone's gone to the Levant.

Still, Washington’s long game is to continue to generate endless
conspiracy theories in Pakistan - betting on chaos in the country
to sooner or later try to get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,
as the ISI sees it. And yet, the current peace process has been
more or less ‘approved’ by Washington. The drone war is
more or less on hold. For now.

Karzai strikes again

Now to the elections in Afghanistan next month. Wily President
Hamid Karzai is busy pushing ‘his’ candidate for
president, Zalmay Rassoul. He appointed former interior minister
and speaker of the lower house of parliament Younus Qanooni as
the vice-presidential candidate, replacing the recently deceased
Mohammad Fahim.

Qanooni, like Fahim, comes from the Panjshir valley and was very
close to the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the
Panjshir assassinated by Al-Qaeda two days before 9/11. Qanooni
was against the US bombing in 2001 and never minced his words
criticizing Karzai.

Karzai’s power play is brilliant because it reinforces his Tajik
connection while undermining the rival candidacy of Abdullah
Abdullah, Washington’s favorite. Rassoul now enjoys a
cross-section Pashtun/Tajik appeal.

The Afghan presidential election will be decided in the second
round of voting. Then we will really see who the top mujahideen
commanders – from Ismail Khan in Herat to Gul Agha Sherzai in
Kandahar – are really endorsing. And how Karzai maneuvered to
once again get what he wants.

From Washington’s point of view Rassoul may be acceptable
because he’s willing to sign the much controversial Status of
Forces Agreement (SOFA) that will allow ‘residual’ US
troops in Afghanistan.

Or at least he said he will sign, after bribing all the warlords
that matter. Rassoul knows if that happens the Taliban will go
for his throat, even if he’s a Pashtun. More likely, if he’s a
wily Pashtun, he’s saying one thing and thinking of doing
another.

So there are two parallel peace processes going on, in Pakistan
and in Afghanistan. The key problem is that ‘peace’
being reached in Pakistan may eventually translate into chaos in
Afghanistan, because then the Afghan Taliban would be reinforced
by the ‘liberated’ Pakistani Taliban in an offensive
against the new government in Kabul.

Some TTP fighters pursued by the Pakistani army are now safely
parked across the border - especially in the aforementioned Kunar
and Nuristan. And over there they would be protected by Afghan
security services, as the Pakistanis complain.

Make no mistake; Pakistani-Afghan rivalry remains extremely
fierce. It wouldn’t be any other way; Afghanistan never
recognized the Durand line, which has deprived it of many of its
own Pashtun lands. Blame the British Empire over 100 years ago.
This remains the key to all this mess.

There’s no question Pashtuns on both sides of the border are
paying immense attention to Crimea. A similar secession would
result in their long-life dream – Pashtunistan. Their problem is
that they would have to be fighting two central governments at
the same time - Kabul and Islamabad. And in terms of
representation, the Taliban, on both sides of the border,
certainly do not answer for the majority of Pashtuns.

We just want to make money

China’s position adds even more spice to this brew. Beijing is
focusing like a laser on the US and NATO withdrawing for good
from Afghanistan at the end of the year. That’s one less hub of
the US Empire of Bases – too close for comfort to the Chinese
border.

Beijing wants a profitable Afghanistan. It’s not happening in the
foreseeable future. In 2008 Chinese Metallurgical Group and
Jiangxi Copper Co bought a 30-year lease on Mes Aynak – the
largest copper mine in the world - in Logar province, for a cool
$3 billion.

Then the Taliban started attacking the mine. And Beijing started
regarding Afghanistan more like a security headache than a source
of profits – even contributing in security cooperation with the
Karzai administration.

An extremely complicating factor is that Beijing has identified
these Taliban attackers as originating from Pakistan. Add that to
Uighurs doing a back and forth with Pakistan, where they receive
training to ‘destabilize’ Xinjiang, and we have a major
problem between staunch allies Beijing-Islamabad. Beijing is
puzzled that Islamabad seems to be doing nothing to stop these
infiltrations.

It gets even murkier when it is quite well known in the region
that some Uighur activists have been infiltrated/manipulated by
the CIA – for decades. So if you’re crossing from northern
Pakistan to Xinjiang, parallel to the Karakoram highway, there’s
a strong possibility you’re an American spy – as Beijing sees it.

Still that is not enough to provoke a serious split between
Beijing and Islamabad. Both roughly agree on the US and NATO out
of Afghanistan. Both roughly disagree on the Taliban having a say
in the new Afghanistan (out of the question for China; depends on
how pliable they would be, for Pakistan).

Most of all, both definitely agree on more trade ties – with
Pakistan fully profiting from a trade corridor from the port of
Gwadar to Xinjiang. And both definitely agree that if Crimea ends
up boosting the Pashtunistan dream, that would be a whole new,
immensely unpredictable, and ‘destabilizing’ ball game.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.